Hagi Kenaan | Tel Aviv University (original) (raw)
2022, mainly by Hagi Kenaan
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2021
In "Todtnauberg," the poem in which Paul Celan responded to his encounter with Martin Heidegger, ... more In "Todtnauberg," the poem in which Paul Celan responded to his encounter with Martin Heidegger, the concept of hope becomes central. The paper focuses on the ways in which hope figures in between the poet and the philosopher, showing that their different understanding of the value of hope is indicative of a much deeper disagreement that calls for an investigation. This investigation is neither analytic nor purely conceptual, but requires us to develop a new way of listening to hope's resonance, one that uncovers the presence of a chasm cutting through the space of language in which this mood becomes meaningful for the poet and the philosopher.
![Research paper thumbnail of Time: Nine Philosophical Dialogues/ A New book by Hagi Kenaan and Yaron Senderowicz [Hebrew] חגי כנען וירון סנדרוביץ, זמן: תשע שיחות פילוסופיות](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/91698155/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Resling Publishing, Tel Aviv, 2022
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2022
J orge Luis Borges begins his story "Delia Elena San Marco" by relating a memory, the memory of s... more J orge Luis Borges begins his story "Delia Elena San Marco" by relating a memory, the memory of saying goodbye to Delia. We said goodbye on one of the corners of the Plaza del Once. From the sidewalk on the other side of the street I turned and looked back; you had turned, and you waved goodbye. A river of vehicles and people ran between us; it was five o'clock on no particular afternoon. How was I to know that that river was the sad Acheron, which no one may cross twice? Then we lost sight of each other, and a year later you were dead. 1
Books by Hagi Kenaan
Photography and Its Shadow, 2020
Photography and Its Shadow argues that the invention of photography marked a rupture in our rela... more Photography and Its Shadow argues that the invention of photography
marked a rupture in our relation to the world and what we see in it. The
dominant theoretical and artistic paradigm for understanding the
invention has been the tracing of shadows. But what photography
really inaugurated was the shadow’s disappearance—a disappearance that irreversibly changed our relationship to nature and the real, to time and to death. A way of negotiating impermanence, photography was marked from the start by an inherent contradiction. It conflated two incompatible configurations of the visible: an embodied human eye, deeply sensitive to nature, and a machine vision that aimed to reify the instant and wallow in images alone.
Photography’s history is replete with efforts to conceal the mystery of its
paradoxical constitution. Born in the century of Nietzsche’s “death of God,” it long enacted the fraught subjectivity of its age. Anxious, haunted by a void, it used an array of strategies to take on ever-new identities. Challenging the hitherto most influential accounts of the practice and taking us from its origins to the present, Hagi Kenaan
shows us how photography has been transformed over time, and how it
transforms us.
Photography and Its Shadow, 2020
In the heated debates over the significance and value of photography that swirled around the medi... more In the heated debates over the significance and value of photography that swirled around the medium in the first few decades after its invention, it was already clear
to both enthusiasts and detractors that the new image-making process was poised to radically alter human experience. Today, a hundred and eighty years after its inception, photography has established itself as the regulating standard for seeing and picturing, remembering and imagining, and, significantly, for mediating relations between ourselves and others. It is now so intimately intertwined within our ordinary routines that we cannot begin to imagine our everyday lives without it. Photography has become an intrinsic condition of the human, a condition that—with Heidegger in mind—may be termed “an Existential.” And yet, photography’s rootedness in the ordinary is so deep that its existential dimension also typically hides from us, challenging us to find a vantage point as well as a philosophical language for describing its pervasive presence.
The book thus lays the groundwork for a philosophical interpretation of the changing condition of photography in the twenty-first century. It should be understood as a prolegomenon—not the kind of wide-ranging Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics we know from Kant and the history of philosophy, but one that is more narrowly construed, concentrating on a specific metaphysical problem: an introduction to a future metaphysics of the image or to a future ontology of the visual. The term “future” applies here, as it does in Kant, to invite further
elaborations of a preliminary ontological framework; but, in contrast to Kant, it also serves to acknowledge and address the ever-changing character of the phenomenon
under investigation and, specifically, the fact that as the visual changes, it generates new possibilities for the future of the image. Photography, as Hans Belting reminds us, constitutes only “a short episode in the old history of representation.” The hegemony of the photographic is a short, and likely, a passing chapter in our relationship with
images. Yet, as it is caught between “today and tomorrow,” photography also provides an opportune framework for rethinking the condition of the visual image in its movement toward the future, a future for which we are responsible, since its trajectory is determined by our present age.
Evental Aesthetics, 2021
In this wide-ranging interview, Hagi Kenaan and Assaf Evron reflect on the potential of photograp... more In this wide-ranging interview, Hagi Kenaan and Assaf Evron reflect on the potential of photography to intervene in times of crisis such as the current global pandemic. This is done in light of Kenaan's new book Photography and Its Shadow, which points to the marked rupture in our relationship with the world that photography provoked and which explains how this initial rupture is crucial for understanding our contemporary visuality. The disappearance of the shadow in photography is indicative, the book argues, of an irreversible change in our relationship to nature, to the real, and to time and death.
Hagi Kenaan. Photography and Its Shadow, Stanford University Press, March 2020, 248 pp. Hardcover ISBn: 9781503606364, paperback ISBn: 9781503611375.
«Le mot hébreu pour «visage» est une forme plurielle: Panim. C’est dire comme le visage est à la ... more «Le mot hébreu pour «visage» est une forme plurielle: Panim. C’est dire comme le visage est à la fois ce qui regarde et ce qui est regardé ; c’est dire à quel point on (re)connaît l’Autre dans le visage que l’on voit, dans celui qui nous regarde, dans cet entre-regards qui fait la relation humaine. C’est pourquoi le visage ne se laisse jamais regarder comme une image, et c’est peut-être le sens de la formule énigmatique de Levinas, «l’éthique est une optique», qui revient à plusieurs reprises dans ses écrits. Dans un monde saturé d’images et de visages désincarnés (publicité, écrans, foule), que reste-t-il de notre responsabilité quand il s’agit de voir? Notre regard porte-t-il encore en puissance la dimension éthique que lui accordait Levinas? «Il n’y a pas si longtemps, il est arrivé quelque chose à notre regard. L’expérience de la vision a changé. Le champ visuel a subi une transformation radicale. Les images sont pourtant plus nettes que jamais. Le niveau des pixels ne cesse d’augmenter. Mais cette acuité dissimule le fait que le sens de la vue n’a plus de sens, que l’œil est cliniquement mort. » C’est à partir de ce constat qu’Hagi Kenaan propose une autre éthique du regard après Levinas.
The Present Personal is a book of our time. Written in Israel, The Present Personal begins with a... more The Present Personal is a book of our time. Written in Israel, The Present Personal begins with an honest confession: “Living in Tel Aviv, in Israel, it has been impossible to alleviate the darkness of this period, one during which violence, hatred, intense human suffering together with the growing indifference toward the suffering of others has become the form of daily life” (Kenaan, 2004, p. iii). Despite the darkening situation that “threatens to leave the engagement with humanistic work bereft of any genuine value”, The Present Personal makes a philosophical attempt to capture the personal at the very heart of the structural at a time when the singular seems either to have disappeared into the propositional, or to have taken flight into a more radical non-propositional it.
Edited Books by Hagi Kenaan
Springer, Contributions to Phenomenology, 2011
Springer, Contributions to Phenomenology, 2011
Phenomenology and Post-Phenomenology by Hagi Kenaan
The article examines Levinas’s evolving relationship with Husserl. It shows how the critical dial... more The article examines Levinas’s evolving relationship with Husserl. It
shows how the critical dialogue with Husserl and, specifically, the
transfiguration of Husserl’s key notion of “intentionality,” grounds
the maturation of Levinas’s ethical thinking. It does so by unpacking
the manner in which the Levinasian critique of Husserl is tied to a
concept of “debt” through which Levinas understands his long-lasting
relationship with the founder of phenomenology.
This paper is concerned with the implications of H usserl's phenomenological reformulation of the... more This paper is concerned with the implications of H usserl's phenomenological reformulation of the problem of error. Following H usserl, I argue that the phenomenon of error should not be understood as the accidental failure of a fully constituted cogito, but that it is itself constitutive of the cogito's formation. I thus show that the phenomenon of error plays a crucial role in our self-understanding as uni ed subjects of experience.
Philosophia, vol. 45, Springer , 2017
We are all familiar with the fact that moods change. But, what is the significance of this famili... more We are all familiar with the fact that moods change. But, what is the significance of this familiar fact? Is change merely a factual characteristic of moods or can it also offer us a lens for gaining a deeper understanding of mood's essence?. The essay's starting point is Heidegger's treatment of moods and their manner of changing. Heidegger, I show, is interested in our ordinary shifts in mood as indicators of a fundamental existential structure that underlies the specificity of any particular mood. Yet, is the changing of moods only a means to reveal the inherent depth-the always already-of our givenness to moods, or is it a dimension significant onto itself? Moving beyond Heidegger, I thus explain why change should be understood as the grounding condition of our being-in-a mood, and consequently, what it means to embrace the relationality and intrinsic plurality-the being singular-plural-of a subjectivity of changing moods. In doing so, I am concerned with the implications that such an analysis carries for the ethical question regarding the freedom and responsibility we have in and over our moods.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2021
In "Todtnauberg," the poem in which Paul Celan responded to his encounter with Martin Heidegger, ... more In "Todtnauberg," the poem in which Paul Celan responded to his encounter with Martin Heidegger, the concept of hope becomes central. The paper focuses on the ways in which hope figures in between the poet and the philosopher, showing that their different understanding of the value of hope is indicative of a much deeper disagreement that calls for an investigation. This investigation is neither analytic nor purely conceptual, but requires us to develop a new way of listening to hope's resonance, one that uncovers the presence of a chasm cutting through the space of language in which this mood becomes meaningful for the poet and the philosopher.
Resling Publishing, Tel Aviv, 2022
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2022
J orge Luis Borges begins his story "Delia Elena San Marco" by relating a memory, the memory of s... more J orge Luis Borges begins his story "Delia Elena San Marco" by relating a memory, the memory of saying goodbye to Delia. We said goodbye on one of the corners of the Plaza del Once. From the sidewalk on the other side of the street I turned and looked back; you had turned, and you waved goodbye. A river of vehicles and people ran between us; it was five o'clock on no particular afternoon. How was I to know that that river was the sad Acheron, which no one may cross twice? Then we lost sight of each other, and a year later you were dead. 1
Photography and Its Shadow, 2020
Photography and Its Shadow argues that the invention of photography marked a rupture in our rela... more Photography and Its Shadow argues that the invention of photography
marked a rupture in our relation to the world and what we see in it. The
dominant theoretical and artistic paradigm for understanding the
invention has been the tracing of shadows. But what photography
really inaugurated was the shadow’s disappearance—a disappearance that irreversibly changed our relationship to nature and the real, to time and to death. A way of negotiating impermanence, photography was marked from the start by an inherent contradiction. It conflated two incompatible configurations of the visible: an embodied human eye, deeply sensitive to nature, and a machine vision that aimed to reify the instant and wallow in images alone.
Photography’s history is replete with efforts to conceal the mystery of its
paradoxical constitution. Born in the century of Nietzsche’s “death of God,” it long enacted the fraught subjectivity of its age. Anxious, haunted by a void, it used an array of strategies to take on ever-new identities. Challenging the hitherto most influential accounts of the practice and taking us from its origins to the present, Hagi Kenaan
shows us how photography has been transformed over time, and how it
transforms us.
Photography and Its Shadow, 2020
In the heated debates over the significance and value of photography that swirled around the medi... more In the heated debates over the significance and value of photography that swirled around the medium in the first few decades after its invention, it was already clear
to both enthusiasts and detractors that the new image-making process was poised to radically alter human experience. Today, a hundred and eighty years after its inception, photography has established itself as the regulating standard for seeing and picturing, remembering and imagining, and, significantly, for mediating relations between ourselves and others. It is now so intimately intertwined within our ordinary routines that we cannot begin to imagine our everyday lives without it. Photography has become an intrinsic condition of the human, a condition that—with Heidegger in mind—may be termed “an Existential.” And yet, photography’s rootedness in the ordinary is so deep that its existential dimension also typically hides from us, challenging us to find a vantage point as well as a philosophical language for describing its pervasive presence.
The book thus lays the groundwork for a philosophical interpretation of the changing condition of photography in the twenty-first century. It should be understood as a prolegomenon—not the kind of wide-ranging Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics we know from Kant and the history of philosophy, but one that is more narrowly construed, concentrating on a specific metaphysical problem: an introduction to a future metaphysics of the image or to a future ontology of the visual. The term “future” applies here, as it does in Kant, to invite further
elaborations of a preliminary ontological framework; but, in contrast to Kant, it also serves to acknowledge and address the ever-changing character of the phenomenon
under investigation and, specifically, the fact that as the visual changes, it generates new possibilities for the future of the image. Photography, as Hans Belting reminds us, constitutes only “a short episode in the old history of representation.” The hegemony of the photographic is a short, and likely, a passing chapter in our relationship with
images. Yet, as it is caught between “today and tomorrow,” photography also provides an opportune framework for rethinking the condition of the visual image in its movement toward the future, a future for which we are responsible, since its trajectory is determined by our present age.
Evental Aesthetics, 2021
In this wide-ranging interview, Hagi Kenaan and Assaf Evron reflect on the potential of photograp... more In this wide-ranging interview, Hagi Kenaan and Assaf Evron reflect on the potential of photography to intervene in times of crisis such as the current global pandemic. This is done in light of Kenaan's new book Photography and Its Shadow, which points to the marked rupture in our relationship with the world that photography provoked and which explains how this initial rupture is crucial for understanding our contemporary visuality. The disappearance of the shadow in photography is indicative, the book argues, of an irreversible change in our relationship to nature, to the real, and to time and death.
Hagi Kenaan. Photography and Its Shadow, Stanford University Press, March 2020, 248 pp. Hardcover ISBn: 9781503606364, paperback ISBn: 9781503611375.
«Le mot hébreu pour «visage» est une forme plurielle: Panim. C’est dire comme le visage est à la ... more «Le mot hébreu pour «visage» est une forme plurielle: Panim. C’est dire comme le visage est à la fois ce qui regarde et ce qui est regardé ; c’est dire à quel point on (re)connaît l’Autre dans le visage que l’on voit, dans celui qui nous regarde, dans cet entre-regards qui fait la relation humaine. C’est pourquoi le visage ne se laisse jamais regarder comme une image, et c’est peut-être le sens de la formule énigmatique de Levinas, «l’éthique est une optique», qui revient à plusieurs reprises dans ses écrits. Dans un monde saturé d’images et de visages désincarnés (publicité, écrans, foule), que reste-t-il de notre responsabilité quand il s’agit de voir? Notre regard porte-t-il encore en puissance la dimension éthique que lui accordait Levinas? «Il n’y a pas si longtemps, il est arrivé quelque chose à notre regard. L’expérience de la vision a changé. Le champ visuel a subi une transformation radicale. Les images sont pourtant plus nettes que jamais. Le niveau des pixels ne cesse d’augmenter. Mais cette acuité dissimule le fait que le sens de la vue n’a plus de sens, que l’œil est cliniquement mort. » C’est à partir de ce constat qu’Hagi Kenaan propose une autre éthique du regard après Levinas.
The Present Personal is a book of our time. Written in Israel, The Present Personal begins with a... more The Present Personal is a book of our time. Written in Israel, The Present Personal begins with an honest confession: “Living in Tel Aviv, in Israel, it has been impossible to alleviate the darkness of this period, one during which violence, hatred, intense human suffering together with the growing indifference toward the suffering of others has become the form of daily life” (Kenaan, 2004, p. iii). Despite the darkening situation that “threatens to leave the engagement with humanistic work bereft of any genuine value”, The Present Personal makes a philosophical attempt to capture the personal at the very heart of the structural at a time when the singular seems either to have disappeared into the propositional, or to have taken flight into a more radical non-propositional it.
The article examines Levinas’s evolving relationship with Husserl. It shows how the critical dial... more The article examines Levinas’s evolving relationship with Husserl. It
shows how the critical dialogue with Husserl and, specifically, the
transfiguration of Husserl’s key notion of “intentionality,” grounds
the maturation of Levinas’s ethical thinking. It does so by unpacking
the manner in which the Levinasian critique of Husserl is tied to a
concept of “debt” through which Levinas understands his long-lasting
relationship with the founder of phenomenology.
This paper is concerned with the implications of H usserl's phenomenological reformulation of the... more This paper is concerned with the implications of H usserl's phenomenological reformulation of the problem of error. Following H usserl, I argue that the phenomenon of error should not be understood as the accidental failure of a fully constituted cogito, but that it is itself constitutive of the cogito's formation. I thus show that the phenomenon of error plays a crucial role in our self-understanding as uni ed subjects of experience.
Philosophia, vol. 45, Springer , 2017
We are all familiar with the fact that moods change. But, what is the significance of this famili... more We are all familiar with the fact that moods change. But, what is the significance of this familiar fact? Is change merely a factual characteristic of moods or can it also offer us a lens for gaining a deeper understanding of mood's essence?. The essay's starting point is Heidegger's treatment of moods and their manner of changing. Heidegger, I show, is interested in our ordinary shifts in mood as indicators of a fundamental existential structure that underlies the specificity of any particular mood. Yet, is the changing of moods only a means to reveal the inherent depth-the always already-of our givenness to moods, or is it a dimension significant onto itself? Moving beyond Heidegger, I thus explain why change should be understood as the grounding condition of our being-in-a mood, and consequently, what it means to embrace the relationality and intrinsic plurality-the being singular-plural-of a subjectivity of changing moods. In doing so, I am concerned with the implications that such an analysis carries for the ethical question regarding the freedom and responsibility we have in and over our moods.
Theory and Criticism, 2012
Critical Inquiry, The University of Chicago Press, 2015
The essay offers an interpretation of Jeff Wall's "Gestus," a statement on the place and signific... more The essay offers an interpretation of Jeff Wall's "Gestus," a statement on the place and significance of gesture in photography. Analyzing Wall's conception of "micro-gestures," I explain how, for Wall, this conception is tied to a wider critical concern with the relationship between subjectivity and the social in the modern age. Gesture, I argue, is a prism that allows Wall to explore the dialectics of the appearance of the subject within the public sphere, while resisting common binarisms. Furthermore, I show that it offers Wall an analogy for articulating the manner in which pictures address the viewer's eye.
Exploring the Selfie, 2018
Is the Selfie simply a contemporary form of self-portraiture? (No!) What is the logic of the Sel... more Is the Selfie simply a contemporary form of self-portraiture? (No!)
What is the logic of the Selfie's visuality, of its presentation of identity? What possibilities can the selfie open for the appearance of the face? What would it mean for the selfie to look after the face and keep its humanity alive? These questions need to be asked as part of philosophy’s role—a role that it shares with art—in opening for
us new ways of resisting an unprecedented kind of reification that gradually prevails over the sphere of the visual.
Photography and the Imagination, Routledge, 2019
To say that photography has an imagination of its own is to imply that, in its ways of image-maki... more To say that photography has an imagination of its own is to imply that, in its ways of image-making, photography involves inherent dimensions of freedom and play and that, as such, it does not function as a passive imprint of a given visibility. But, in what ways does photography’s imagination point beyond the visible? And, how should we understand its connection to the invisible? The paper discusses photography’s ongoing preoccupation with invisibilities, prefaced with a reading of Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic notion of the “optical unconscious.” Examining the “grammar” of the different kinds of invisibility that are operative in photography, I locate a crucial distinction between lacunae in the visible that photography’s method of visualization overcomes and lacunae in photography’s own visuality. Accordingly, the paper’s central question is: In what ways is the invisible part of and present in what we see in photographs? I argue that what is hidden in photographs is not any positive content that eludes the ordinary eye only to be captured by the machine, but the opposite: photography's invisibles are dimensions of the real that cannot be framed as a positive and elude the eye precisely when framed photographically and subsumed under our our habits of looking at photographs.
Journal of Visual Culture, 2010
This article examines the connection between Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking of images and his radical ... more This article examines the connection between Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking of images and his radical ontology of the singular plural. It shows how Heidegger's conception of Dasein becomes operative in Nancy's understanding of the visual and examines the implications which Nancy's critique of Heidegger carries for a new ontology of the image. The article's central concern is the question of what it means for a philosophy of the visual to embrace the singular plural? In what senses is the singular plural the foundation of an image's being? How should the singular plural play itself out in a thinking of the image? Focusing on Nancy's interpretation of painting's origins, the article questions the manner in which the ethical consequences of Nancy's ontology are brought to bear on his understanding of art.
The Next Thing, 2013
The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-first Century is a highly visual collection of essays about the... more The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-first Century is a highly visual collection of essays about the future of art and the art of the future. This anthology brings together writings by world-renown theorists, artists, critics, novelists and philosophers, all of them engaged in current discussions about new and emerging artistic trends and sensibilities. From "post-human" installations, to transgenic experimentations, from tele-presence performance, to nano design, digital-fiction, virtual urbanism or "guerilla art", new tendencies, are redefining both the boundaries of Meaning and what it means to be Human. The essays comprising The Next Thing identify the impact of these new trends and anticipate possible zeitgeists that will define our century. This anthology counts with contributions by Stelarc, Liliana Porter, Ana Tiscornia, Mieke Bal, Polona Tratnik, Hagi Kenaan, Sue "Johnny" Golding, Pablo Baler, Mark Axelrod, Glenn Harper, Jan Garden Castro, Salima Hashmi, Rashid Rana, Huma Mulji, Ajesha Jatoi, Quddus Mirza, and Naazish Ata-Ullah. Like the artworks here discussed, the book itself is endowed with a transformative power and a subversive understanding of the limits of human identity. The Next Thing challenges perception, defies our imagination and pushes the boundaries of both ethics and aesthetics. For more information on The Next Thing and Pablo Baler, please visit: http: //www.pablobaler.com/.
To Nurith, my mother, who with infinite love taught me how to look at paintings 1. To draw a line... more To Nurith, my mother, who with infinite love taught me how to look at paintings 1. To draw a line by candlelight I n his memoirs, the painter Giorgio de Chirico returns to his childhood with particular attention to the times and events surrounding the death of his father. In his description of that period clouded by death, there are two particular episodes that invite us to draw a connection between de Chirico's experience of loss and mourning and the developing sense of his vocation as an artist. The first episode had taken place a few weeks before the death of Giorgio's father.
The paper offers an articulation of the relationship between contemporary Chinese art and " Weste... more The paper offers an articulation of the relationship between contemporary Chinese art and " Western Theory" in terms of the complex dynamics of "hospitality".
![Research paper thumbnail of The Image's Address: Beyond the Frontal Gaze [Hebrew] הפנייה של הדימוי: מעבר למבט החזיתי](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/36077493/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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Kierkegaard and the Language o f S ilen ce
I return, In this paper, to one of the central points of contention in the renowned debate betwee... more I return, In this paper, to one of the central points of contention in the renowned debate between John Searle and Jacques Derrida with the aim of rethinking the role of success and the place of failure in communication. What is the philosophical significance of Austin’s decision to exclude from his investigation (in How to Do Things with Words) certain utterances that cannot qualify as successful? Examining the conflicting ways in which Searle and Derrida understand and respond to Austin, I try to flesh out Derrida’s call to grant failure (or the “negative”) the important place it deserves in our understanding of speech. Yet, whereas for Derrida, the call to recognize failure as an “internal and positive condition” ultimately leads to a structural – albeit a deconstructive – critique of language’s conditions of possibility, I focus instead on the implications which this insight may have for our understanding of the actuality of language. Consequently, I argue that while Derrida’s critique subverts the hegemony of success, it ironically remains, like Searle, distant from and external to the actual reverberation of spoken language.
![Research paper thumbnail of The Philosopher and the Window [Hebrew] הפילוסוף והחלון](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/33136214/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Routledge, 2017
This article o ers a philosophical account of a range of urban phenomena that are integral to the... more This article o ers a philosophical account of a range of urban phenomena that are integral to the visual fabric of the modern city and, at the same time, external to the visual order administered by the city’s rulers. Explaining why the common terms of “gra ti” and “street art” are too narrow for discussing the plurality of the illicit visual forms that populate the city’s space, I coin the alternative term “streetography” and aim at a new understanding of its visual e cacy. This is done by showing that the key for deciphering the streetograph’s unique visuality is its form of embeddedness in the street and, in a corollary manner, the form of visual experience—the kinds of viewing—that the street opens for the urban viewer.
Streetographs always operate within the city’s given visual order and as such the question of their e cacy is addressed here in terms of the streetograph’s relationship to that hegemonic visual rule whose basic traits are also clari ed. Developing an understanding of this relationship, the article thus addresses the following questions: What kind of resistance can streetographs provide to the kind of optics that governs the modern urban space? Can streetographs evoke an alternative kind of spectatorship that disrupts the sovereign’s imagination? And, more speci cally, in an epoch in which streetographs are regularly absorbed into capitalist aesthetics— advertising, cinema, social media—how can they allow us to rethink the possibility of resisting the measure of a global capitalist visual system?
